A Working Adsense Example

[thebbqguy]

I have been blogging for several years and using Adsense to help monetize my blogs. Adsense worked ok for the first year or so, but it is no longer working well.

Product Page Views
AdSense for Content 988,728
Hosted AdSense for Content 33,139
AdSense for Feeds 3,226
AdSense for Search 282
AdSense API Referral Bounty 1
Total Page Views 1,025,376
Total Earnings $4,180.43

So 1 million page views equals $4,180.43. Those guys earning $20k a month blogging must be generating a massive amount of traffic.

[jacob]

The figures I hear are generally $3-8/1000 views. Those numbers are considered good and only attainable if monetization is a serious goal and takes priority over things like oh... integrity, etc. So you're doing okay.

When I tried to monetize I put in a half-assed effort---I'd give my monetization effort a C or D---and came in around $2/1000 views. Right now the monetization of my blog is a flat zero. There's nothing there. Too much hassle. I ignore daily requests to publish paid guest posts and weekly request for inline text ads (seems to be the popular thing now). This stuff seems to come in waves. The forum has some ads at the bottom requiring zero effort from me.

Of course it also depends on what you write about. You need to optimize the payout of the field (personal finance = high, jokes about cats = low) and your audience's propensity to buy shit (consumer blogs = high, ERE = very low).

In general, once you start getting big (>250k pageviews/month), ad companies start getting interested in directly managing campaigns for you. Adsense is essentially focused/used by the long fat tail.

[workathome]

As Jacob said, depends largely on content. I get $3-5/1000 on a broad mix of international traffic on an entertainment site.

You can work to increase the prominence of ads, but this can have a negative impact on return traffic and "user experience". Recently Google has been said to underweight ad-rich sites in search results.

Depending on your niche you may try creating your own project or promoting affiliate products on your site, which could have better results. For example, MrMoneyMustache said he was making a lot on Credit Card affiliate referrals.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/22 ... -Algorithm

[thebbqguy]

A big part of my issue is that I purposely chose not to engage many of the people who contact me for interviews for radio and podcasts. I personally don't consider myself an expert and I hate it when other people try to fake their expertise. So a big part of my lack of traffic has been of my own making in that regard.

If I was starting over from scratch I would design my blog so that a lot of the content is self-generating by incorporating a discussion forum Back when I started my blog, there were only a couple of high quality blogs covering my niche. Now there are 100's if not 1,000's due to the increased interest in the topic and promotion by niche cable TV channels.

[workathome]

You might do well to create an e-Book, or self-published book, relevant to your topic. You could pursue the interview opportunities and have your book mentioned as part of the bio. It seems to work alright for the big-shots.

[secretwealth]

You can still do an interview without saying you're an expert. Just emphasize in your interview, "I'm no expert, but I have tried to learn something about X, and I want to share and hopefully learn more from my readers." That kind of humble approach is good marketing, too.

Another point: affiliate marketing seems to be where the real money is. If you look at Pat Flynn's monthly income reports, the vast majority is coming from generating leads to other online marketing products: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com. The whole thing seems kinda pyramid scheme-ish to me, but it's apparently working great for him.

[plantingourpennies]

Another point: affiliate marketing seems to be where the real money is. If you look at Pat Flynn's monthly income reports, the vast majority is coming from generating leads to other online marketing products: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com. The whole thing seems kinda pyramid scheme-ish to me, but it's apparently working great for him.

Pyramids work great if you are at the top, not so great at the bottom. From the outside they look like a cargo cult =)

Best,
Mr. PoP

[Pedal2Petal]

I am seeing similar numbers to you guys. I'll share some figures for comparison.

My biggest website gets around 6.15$ per 1k pageviews, plus another 2 or 3$ per 1k from amazon referrals. My poorest performing website (video gaming related) gets only around 30 cents per 1k and my best performer earns over $17 per 1k.

In my experience, the topic your blog is about has an enormous impact on your adsense earnings. Just look at my figures - the difference between my low and high performers is around 2 orders of magnitude.

I give my monetization efforts a B-, I've done a lot to improve them but it isn't my top priority, except for my 17$ CPM website which I bought a special theme for which maximizes ad clicks -although I have kept some features of this theme *off* which I judge to be too slimy.

[thebbqguy]

Here are couple of the most popular monetized blogs that really produce consistent monthly income:

http://dooce.com/
http://thepioneerwoman.com/

I don't read their blogs, but I do admire their ability to make money.

I also find it interesting that both blogs have a lot of photography focused posts.

[tylerherman]

Like everyone else mentioned, it all depends on the niche. There are plenty of other ways to make money, starting at selling your own products and services going down to where you're at, selling ad space.

build your own products > sell other peoples products > dropship other peoples products > affiliate marketing > ppc advertising

Wouldn't say any one method is better but there is probably far more profit potential on the product side (and more risk/barriers to entry). I'd look into doing some light affiliate marketing. See if you can get a product to sell. If you find something good, work your way up from there.